SpaceEngine
SpaceEngine's logo
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| Developer(s) | Vladimir Romanyuk |
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| Stable release |
0.9.8.0 / 30 July 2016
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| Preview release |
0.9.7.4 beta, RC3 / 19 June 2016
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| Development status | Beta |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system |
Windows XP and later Linux (planned) OS X (planned) |
| Size | 1.35 GB |
| Available in | English, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Spanish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish |
| Type | Space simulation |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website |
EN: spaceengine RU: spaceengine |
SpaceEngine (stylized as "Space Engine") is a proprietary 3D astronomy program and game engine developed by Russian astronomer and programmer Vladimir Romanyuk. It creates a three-dimensional planetarium representing the entire universe from a combination of real astronomical data and scientifically-accurate procedural generation algorithms. Users can travel through space in any direction or speed, and forwards or backwards in time. SpaceEngine is in beta status and is currently freeware for Microsoft Windows.
Properties of objects, such as temperature, mass, radius, etc., are presented to the user on the HUD and in an accessible information window. Users can observe objects from small spacecraft to galaxy clusters, similar to other simulators such as Celestia. SpaceEngine includes thousands of real objects, including stars from the Hipparcos catalog, galaxies from the NGC and IC catalogs, several well-known nebulae, and all known exoplanets and their stars.
The proclaimed goal of SpaceEngine is scientific realism, and to reproduce every type of known astronomical phenomenon. It uses star catalogs along with procedural generation to create a cubical universe 10 billion parsecs on a side, centered on the Earth. The use of procedural generation allows for a much larger universe to explore than similar programs; billions of galaxies can be explored, each with billions of stars, planets, and moons.
The real objects that SpaceEngine includes are the Hipparcos catalog for stars, the NGC and IC catalogs for galaxies, all known exoplanets, and prominent star clusters, nebulae, and Solar System objects.
SpaceEngine currently uses procedural methods to generate:
The surfaces of terrestrial planets are generated using an algorithm based on fractal noise.
Everything is based on the same seed, which produces the same simulated universe in every computer on which the program runs, making it possible to share locations between users.
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Wikipedia